Gerald Seymour - The Collaborator

‘You insult me.’ She tried to stamp her foot, and mud spattered out from under her shoe. No avenue of retreat was open to her. She knew it, and so did he. She couldn’t throw a tantrum, spin on her heel – slip probably – and walk away. She had met him. Perhaps she had been photographed with a long lens from a car among those parked bumper to bumper around the park. Perhaps he had a wire strapped to his chest and a microphone in one of his jacket buttons. Did she believe that – if she walked out on him – the ROS would not allow a photograph limited distribution among the journalists accredited to the palace, or not make available a snatch of her voice to the RAI correspondent in the city? On Sunday mornings priests talked often about taking personal responsibility for one’s actions, the need to consider consequences beforehand. She couldn’t meet his eyes and dropped her head. It had stopped raining, the wind had freshened, and she shivered.

He said, ‘You know better than I do that the name for such a person is infame. That person is not a patriot, a hero or heroine. Disgrace walks with them, and the infame who betrays his or her family is the lowest of the low. You could never stand, Signorina, on a box in the piazza del Plebiscito and attempt an explanation of what you have done. You’ll become a pariah and be forced to make a new life.’

Her lip trembled and her voice, to her, was hoarse. ‘I will.’

‘Never go back?’

‘I won’t.’

‘If you’re found again in Naples, what will happen to you?’

‘They’ll kill me.’

‘What do they do, Signorina, to an infame before he or she is killed?’ He was relentless. ‘What do they do?’

‘I don’t know what they do to a woman. I know what they do to a man.’

The crowd was four deep in places where the best view was to be had. The girl reporter from the crime desk barged her way through, offered no apologies and kicked the ankle of an obese man who didn’t shift out of her way. When she was through the spectators, she looked for her photographer, located him and went to his side. ‘My car wouldn’t start,’ she said.

‘Your car’s shit and always will be. My cousin deals-’

‘Yeah, yeah. What have we got?’

Relaxed, the photographer smoked a small cheroot, took it out of his mouth and blew smoke, then used it to point at a space on the pavement between two parked vehicles. A checked tablecloth that doubled as a shroud filled it. The feet of the corpse, its shoes and blue socks, stuck out from the covering, and she could see where blood had diverted round sprouting weeds to dribble into the gutter, where it was dammed by a plastic bag. Beyond the cars, half hidden, a police scene-of-crime technician manoeuvred a camera fixed to a tripod, other officers standing around languidly, and an ambulance was parked further down the street. She stretched up, laying a hand on the photographer’s shoulder, and could see better past the parked cars. A woman sat on a straight-backed wooden chair no more than two metres from the body. She wore a nightdress of thin cotton with a dressing-gown, as if she’d been roused from her bed, and cradled a child – a boy of perhaps four – as she stared blankly ahead.

The photographer said, ‘I done her – she’s the wife – wrong, the widow. I done her when she first came, bawling and screaming. That was before they covered him up.’

‘Do we have a name?’

‘The police have, but they haven’t shared it – you’ll get it off the street or, officially, at the Questura.’

That was where she worked, on the ground floor of the police headquarters, off via Medina and down near the sea front, in the cavernous Mussolini-era building in the room where the crime-desk hacks fed off the information they were given. She was relatively new to the city but her father had a business partner who had an uncle who had influence at the newspaper, and it had always been her ambition to work as a crime reporter. The link had secured her the job – the normal way of things in the city. The more senior staffers on the team were out of town because a supplement was being prepared on the Casalesi clan operating in Caserta, so her phone had rung – and her car hadn’t started. She might well take up the photographer’s offer to introduce her to a cousin who dealt in secondhand vehicles. What they said in the newsroom about the photographer told her that a car from that source would be cheap, but the chance of paperwork to accompany it was slight. She had her notebook out and a ballpoint pen.

‘So, what happened? Was he shot?’

‘You sure you want to know?’

‘Of course.’

‘Have you had breakfast?’

‘No – because the car wouldn’t start and I was late and-’

‘Better on an empty stomach. It’s not pretty.’

Most of the murders she had covered since she’d joined the crime desk had been pistol shots into the head of a man eating in a trattoria, drinking in a bar, sitting in a car, playing cards with associates. ‘Tell me.’

‘You asked. See there, behind where he’s lying? There’s a grocery. The drogheria, of course, has steel shutters down at night. The padlock was cut and the shutters lifted enough to get a man under. They needed electrical power. They took the cable in with them, found a point and plugged it in. Then they went two doors down, called at the place and the wife said her husband wasn’t in and went back to bed. They waited for him to come back from wherever, jumped him and dragged him to where the shutter was up. He would have seen – not much light on the street but enough – what they had waiting for him and he’d have been shitting himself, too scared to scream, and they’d started the engine – can you take this?’

‘Try me.’

‘They’d plugged in a circular-blade tile-cutter.’

‘Jesus, help us.’

‘One of the cops told me before the big apparatchiks took over. There’s no pretty way to say this, but they cut off his balls first, then put them in his mouth – forced open his teeth and shoved them in. This is the twenty-first century, this is Naples, a cradle of civilisation. You doing all right?’

‘Fine.’

‘They put some euro notes in too. Then they cut his head off. The blade can go right through a bathroom or kitchen-floor tile, so it wouldn’t have had a problem with a neck. They took his head off and laid it in his crotch so it covered up where his balls had been.’

‘Did you say “a cradle of civilisation”?’

‘They did all this on a pavement and there’s a streetlight no more than fifty metres away. People must have passed him in the night after they’d driven off. They must have seen him with his head in his crotch, gagging on his balls and the money, and must have stepped round him, kept going. People live over the drogheria and alongside it, but they never heard anything. Nothing heard and nothing seen. The grocery owner came to open the shop before going to the market and found him. What more do you want to know?’

She swallowed hard. If she had thrown up, she would have demeaned herself, and it would have gone straight round the city’s newsrooms and the hacks’ room at the Questura. She swallowed, gulped. Then she looked hard at the face of the widow, and thought she saw acceptance, not anger. She wondered if she could write her piece on the expression of fatalism, base it round the mood that seemed to grip the woman. She didn’t keen and the child didn’t weep.

‘I want to know what he’d done to be punished like this.’

‘He was a carpenter.’

‘Why was he killed like that, though?’

‘The policeman who talked to me said that the Borelli clan, who have this territory, wanted the pizzo from him.’

‘So they extort cash from him – a hundred euros a week?’